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bring my stories together. Relationships with robots are ramping up; relationships with people are ramping down. What road are we travelling? Technology presents itself as a one-way street; we are likely to dismiss discontents about its direction because we read them as growing out of nostalgia or a Luddite impulse or as simply in vain. But when we ask what we “miss,” we may discover what we care about, what we believe to be worth protecting. We prepare ourselves not necessarily to reject technology but to shape it in ways that honor what we hold dear. Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.” 23 We make our technologies, and they, in turn, shape us. So, of every technology we must ask, Does it serve our human purposes?—a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. Technologies, in every generation, present opportunities to reflect on our values and direction. I intend Alone Together to mark a time of opportunity.
     
     
    I turn now to the story of the robotic moment. It must begin with objects of the playroom because it is there that a generation was introduced to the idea that machines might be partners in mutual affection. But my story is not about child’s play. We are on the verge of seeking the company and counsel of sociable robots as a natural part of life. Before we cross this threshold, we should ask why we are doing so. It is one thing to design a robot for an instrumental purpose: to search for explosives in a war zone or, in a more homely register, to vacuum floors and wash dishes. But the robots in this book are designed to be with us. As some of the children ask, we must ask, Why do people no longer suffice?
    What are we thinking about when we are thinking about robots? We are thinking about the meaning of being alive, about the nature of attachment, about what makes a person. And then, more generally, we are rethinking, What is a relationship? We reconsider intimacy and authenticity. What are we willing to give up when we turn to robots rather than humans? To ask these questions is not to put robots down or deny that they are engineering marvels; it is only to put them in their place.
    In the 1960s through the 1980s, debates about artificial intelligence centered on the question of whether machines could “really” be intelligent. These discussions were about the objects themselves, what they could and could not do. Our new encounters with sociable robots—encounters that began in the past decade with the introduction of simple robot toys into children’s playrooms—provoke responses that are not about these machines’ capabilities but our vulnerabilities. As we will see, when we are asked to care for an object, when an object thrives under our care, we experience that object as intelligent, but, more importantly, we feel ourselves to be in a relationship with it. The attachments I describe do not follow from whether computational objects really have emotion or intelligence, because they do not. The attachments follow from what they evoke in their users. Our new objects don’t so much “fool us” into thinking they are communicating with us; roboticists have learned those few triggers that help us fool ourselves. We don’t need much. We are ready to enter the romance.

PART ONE
     
    The Robotic Moment
     

    In Solitude, New Intimacies
     

CHAPTER 2
     
    Alive enough
     
    I n the 1990s, children spoke about making their virtual creatures more alive by having them escape the com p uter. Furbies, the sensation of the 1998 holiday season, embody this documented dream. If a child wished a Tamagotchi to leap off its screen, it might look a lot like the furry and owl-like Furby. The two digital pets have other things in common. As with a Tamagotchi, how a Furby is treated shapes its personality. And both present themselves as visitors from other worlds. But Furbies are more explicit about their purpose in coming to Earth. They are here to learn